Disclaimer: I put this together for our UX Intern at my place of work - it's publicly available in case anyone else finds it useful but it's not meant to be 100% comprehensive! And will inevitably reflect the biases of what I'm interested in and what we're looking to achieve with UX at York.

User Experience or UX, as it is defined in the library context, is a suite of techniques based around first understanding and then improving the experiences people have when using our library services. It utilises ethnography and design to achieve this.

Andy Priestner (all links on this page will open in a new window, by the way) is a librarian and trainer / consultant who created the first UX in Libraries Conference in the UK in 2015. He defines the whole thing in the May 2015 edition of CILIP Update as follows:

Ethnography is simply a way of studying cultures through observation, participation and other qualitative techniques with a view to better understanding the subject’s point of view and experience of the world. Applied to the library sector, it’s about user research that chooses to go beyond the default and largely quantitative library survey, with a view to obtaining a more illuminating and complex picture of user need. These are often hidden needs that our users do not articulate, find it difficult to describe, are unwilling to disclose, or don’t even know that they have – which special ethnographic approaches are perfect for drawing out.

As for ‘UX’, until recently it has largely referred to design and usability of a website or software, but it is now enjoying a broader – and more useful – definition which encompasses user experience of spaces and services too. UX in Libraries [endeavours] to weave together ethnography, usability, and space and service design techniques under one umbrella.

The academic library context

As you can see from the slides above, libraries are (mostly) extremely user-focused and always seeking to get a proper understanding of how our users interact with our services, and how they rate them. We have a lot of survey data from the National Student Survey, the LibQual+ Survey, PTES and PRES surveys of Postgraduates, plus our own shorter surveys and focus groups.

Ethnography is not meant to replace these, it's meant to supplement them and ensure we aren't too reliant on any one source of feedback. UX is fundamentally MESSY in comparison with the other ways in which we gather information about our users. It takes a long time to do and even longer to process what we learn (and perhaps longer still to make design changes to the way our services work as a result). We want UX to get to the emotion: how people feel about our services, and what they truly need for those services to be more effective - whether they can articulate those needs at this stage or not.

The process of UX in Libraries, reduced to it's most basic form, is first to seek to understand our users through ethnographic techniques, analyse and process what we learn about them, then to design better services or products based on what we learn. Often libraries use a 'rapid prototyping model' - which is to say when we learn something we could do to improve the user experience, we will do it as soon as possible, see how it works, and if need be change it again quickly after that.

The UX in Libraries Conference

As you can see from all the links above the UX in Libraries Conference was very important in establishing UX in a library context in the UK. Matt also curated a list of write-ups of the conference. I've copied and pasted the below from his site - it should provide a lot of insight into ethnography, design, and UX in general.

Weave UX is an open source journal dedicated to Open Source, wrangled by Matthew Reidsma whose UXLibs keynote on Design is linked above. Mikael Jergefelt's article on using beacons to blend the physical and online user experiences is excellent.

Going Further

The ERIAL Project is huge ethnographic study in an American academic library. There's plenty to learn on their website in general, but in particular read the ebook they produced: College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know.

There are various books on the subject recommended by existing practitioners of ethnography in libraries - in particular Wolcott (2008) 'Ethnography: a way of seeing' which a lot of people speak very highly of including Donna Lanclos, Andrew Asher and Andrew Preater. Donna also recommends Foster & Gibbons (2007) 'Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester'. Andrew suggested Blommaert & Dong (2010) 'Ethnographic fieldwork a beginner's guide', Pickard (2013) ‘Research Methods in Information’, 2nd edition, and Charmaz (2014) 'Constructing grounded theory'.

An article to read after exploring some of the techniques of UX

This is a much more formal piece of writing than most of what is above, and is not something to dive into right away. It is though a VERY comprehensive look at UX in libraries up until 2012 - thanks to Ange Fitzpatrick for the link.